Band Stepping Exercises For Injury Prevention And Skating Position
Video Transcript:
I'm Mike Potenza, the Director of Strength and Conditioning for the San Jose Sharks. Today I'm going to show you some band stepping exercises, and the coaching cues that go along with them.
Here in San Jose, we use these exercises to strengthen the depth in that low position that mimics skating, and we also use it for an injury prevention tool by strengthening the muscles are the hip.
Two of the things that I see that are improper execution of these exercises are what I call "casting out" or overstepping when you're going into your patterns, and the lack of activation for the muscle groups that surround an area group you're focusing on.
Exercise #1: Band Lateral Walk
Our first exercise is going to the be the classic band stepping lateral skater walk pattern that everybody does. Most commonly, I'll see somebody reach, then roll over. Here you put your knee in a disadvantageous position and it doesn't really look like skating. So what we encourage our coaches to do is to emphasize the push off that leg, off the right leg because I'm going left. Get straight, activate that quad because you want to get that triple extension, and you want that [stance leg] to stay underneath you, just like skating. You DON'T want to create that railroad, valgus knee position off the ice or on the ice.
You can take this into a zig zag pattern, give them a little progression forward. Have them pause, and check their depth.
Exercise #2: Band Widening Position
The next one we'll use is a widening position. That just start in an athletic position. We use a Perform Better Power Band. And we're going to get a little bit wider and push out so that band doesn't collapse our knees together. Sometimes we'll see that and guys won't get into that squat position and push away. That creates the isometric contraction of the glute med and helps us get out wide on the ice when you're protecting the puck.
A variation we use, is we add a transverse plane component: I'm straight and I take a step 90 degrees. I come back to reset and come back to the 90 degrees. In our 90 degrees step we're still looking at that trail leg to make sure that knee doesn't pop off into valgus. We want to make we can push that out and create that perfect 90 degree angle.
Exercise #3: Straight Leg Abduction
The last exercise I'll share with you is a take on straight leg abduction for glute med work. We always do the side-lying straight leg abduction drills. But now we're going to take it to the frontal plane: push out and come back. Again, that cue I mentioned earlier where we don't fire the surrounding the muscles properly or don't sequence them properly. You have to make sure your quad is tight, your glute med is tight, and that you're not tipping to the side.
You can take that to a walk but make sure the athletes is balanced, not tipping, and make sure that quad is firing and you're not getting that knee to kick out. It's gotta be nice and straight.
I have you guys like these videos and exercises. Take them back to your teams and try them out and engage with us on the forum at prohockeystrength.com, where all the strength coaches from the NHL and AHL are sharing their ideas.
